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Tracking and Eliminating the Elusive Pharaoh Ant

"ACES | ants pest control Auckland, is aware that this ant has been found in New Zealand, but is generally uncommon. Careful management of this species is required otherwise you can trigger their "budding" mechanisims where queens leave the nest with workers and set up mutliple remote nest sites. This makes the problem much worse. If you see the "golden" Pharaoh ant best to call the Professionals straight away!"

As its name suggests, the pharaoh ant views itself as a ruler among ants, a real headache for home and business owners.

As its name suggests, the pharaoh ant certainly views itself as a ruler among ants and they can be a real headache for home and business owners, and the pest management professionals that are tasked with eliminating them.

Unlike other ant species that are easily traced by following visible trails, pharaoh ants do not necessarily follow specific trails when they forage for food and harborage. Combine that with their preference to establish nests in hard-to-reach locations like wall voids, subfloors and attics, and the pharaoh ant is a worthy adversary.

Pharaoh ants are a problem in both commercial and residential accounts. While primarily a nuisance in residential accounts, they can present a health threat in food processing and healthcare facilities, hotels and grocery stores because they can carry and leave behind harmful bacteria (i.e. Salmonella, E. coli) on surfaces they come in contact with.

Pharaoh ants are drawn to commercial facilities because of the warm, humid conditions and abundant food and water sources that are often found inside within commercial kitchens and laundries.

There have been numerous documented cases where pharaoh ants have posed a major threat in healthcare facilities hospitals, nursing homes and extended care facilities where they have entered patient wounds and IV bags seeking moisture.

Pharaoh ant colonies are large in size with multiple nests and when they are displaced sometimes the result of a pesticide application members will venture off and establish new colonies in a process called budding.

In residential homes, pharaoh ants typically nest near the kitchen including voids under cabinets, behind baseboards and under floors. They also use electrical, cable and telephone wiring as a highway system to travel through walls and between floorboards.

Considering the challenges pharaoh ants present, what are the best methods for combatting them?

John Judge, training specialist for Environmental Pest Services in Tampa, Fla., which manages operations in three different Southern states, says a proper inspection and strategic bait placements are key elements of a pharaoh ant management program.
The pharaoh ant is not hard to identify but when it splits off during the budding process it can move rapidly and infest the other side of the structure from where you originally found it, says Judge. Because of its mobility a technician must look at the whole house rather than just his or her inspection in one area.

The proper use of inspection tools (i.e. flashlights, probing tools, etc.) and knowledge of construction practices (i.e. identifying connecting walls, location of electrical wiring, etc.) will also help the technician track the source of the infestation and how it got there.

Pharaoh ants found on the outside of the structure should be lured away by the strategic use of baits and repeated treatments may be required to completely eliminate this pesky invader.

Judge says the customer also plays an important part in preventing pharaoh ant by following good sanitation practices.

Keeping kitchens and food preparation areas clean of spilled food and removing excess moisture and clutter will make those areas less attractive to pharaoh ants, says Judge. As with most pest issues securing customer buy-in goes a long way.

A proactive approach to pharaoh ant management with customers understanding how basic maintenance tasks and adhering to good sanitation practices will help mitigate the problem.

The Pharaoh Ant Profile

Pharaoh ants are very small workers about a 1/16 of an inch in length

Coloration ranges from yellow to light brown

They do not swarm and colonies can number in the hundreds of thousands

Pharaoh ants can nest indoors and outdoors

Indoors they will infest hard-to-reach areas including wall voids, subfloors and attics

Their preferred diet includes sugary foods (syrups, fruit juices, jellies) but they will also eat dead and live insects

FREE TIPS FOR CUSTOMERS

Seal all possible points of entry around the house including small openings and cracks around doors and windows

Keep counters and floors clean and free of crumbs

Store food in airtight containers and dispose of garbage regularly in sealed receptacles

Eliminate sources of standing water outside and use a dehumidifier indoors to prevent moisture buildup

Tips (DIY) to keep ants out of your home

ACES pest control using another technique when compared to this article. There are two ways of treating ants, repellent ( imagine a red STOP sign) which sets a barrier around the house. Effectively immediately as little ants are easy to kill. But always a temporary fix as it never gets to the Queen. This is the method described in this article. ACES uses the second method, NON repellent or TRANSFER ( imagine a Green GO sign). The technique is slow and not very impressive initially, but is very harmful the nest and Queen (s). ACES uses 100% transfer products. We hope you enjoy Emilys article.

GREENVILLE, N.C. What do you think of when a six legged, mighty, food scavenger comes to mind? Ants and lots of them.

You won’t notice them until they come home and they see hundreds of them on their countertops and their pantries and that kind of thing, said Peter Schonemann of Russ Pest Control. Then it’s a problem.

If you can get rid of them outside, then you won’ t have as many problems inside, Schonemann said.

Spending the past half hour trying to find an ant hill was difficult. It seemed the weather was just too hot.

If you get a lot of hot weather, it’s really dry they are looking for moisture, said Schonemann. And they end up sending out foragers looking for food. They find that crumb the kids left, or sugar you spilled when you made some coffee that kind of thing.

But there is one ant that is easier to spot than the others.

Fire ants are the most difficult ant to control, said Carl Little, Lowe’s garden employee. Although three species are common in our area argentine ants, odorous house ants, and fire ants fire ants are the worst.

Fire ants are one of the biggest problems we have in eastern North Carolina, said Little.

The best way to take care of them is, pre-treat the best thing to always do is pre-treat in the early spring or summer with something like a broad pesticide or broad product with something like a slower release than wait ‘til you have the problem.

And when taking care of that ant hill in your backyard on your own, go for the pesticide that targets the one that, kills the queen of the nest, and therefore eliminates the problem altogether.

adapted by ACES pest control from and aricle from By Emily Gibbs from http://wnct.com/2017/07/25/tips-to-keep-ants-out-of-your-home/

for more information on services offered by ACES pest control please click here for our services for rodents please click here for services for ants please click here and for cockroaches please click here

Humans only invented agriculture some 10,000 years ago, but ants have been doing it for millions of years. New analysis indicates that, although ants operate farms in many environments, true domestication occurred 30 million years ago, in desert or near-desert conditions.

Attine ant species form a symbiotic relationship with fungi. The six-legged farmers propagate the fungus, providing it with nutrients and protection from other animals that might consume it more recklessly. In return, they get to eat the fungal growth.

Like bakers' apprentices taking precious starter dough to found their business, attine ants carry a small amount of fungus when they found a new colony. As with human agriculture, this has shaped the genetics of the species they farm, since varieties of fungus that best suit attine needs are more likely to be farmed.

Smithsonian Museum entomologist Dr Ted Schultz compared the DNA of 119 ant species, 78 of which are farmers. reporting his findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. He mapped the timing of when species diverged, using fossils for confirmation, to locate those closest to the trunk of the ant farmers' family tree.

The 250 known species of fungus-farming ants are divided into those that practice what is called "lower" and "higher" agriculture. Lower agriculture uses fungal species that can live without the ants' protection. Sometimes the fungus will spread beyond the colony to grow in the wild, becoming a resource for the ants to draw on if their crops fail.

Higher agriculture involves fungi that, like many human crops, have been so modified by the farmers as to be unable to survive independently. Since the ants cannot survive without their fungi, the two species are locked in mutual dependence.

Lower agriculture has previously been estimated to have begun in South America 55-65 million years ago. Schultz's work indicates higher agriculture dates back around 30 million years and began in a dry climate, contradicting previous assumptions of a wet origin.

Global climatic changes at the time dried much of South American out. Suitable ranges for rainforest fungi would have contracted, and Schultz thinks some were saved by ants that provided them with reliable moisture, collecting water for humidity-controlled fungal gardens.

"These higher agricultural-ant societies have been practicing sustainable, industrial-scale agriculture for millions of years," Schultz said in a statement. "Studying their dynamics and how their relationships with their fungal partners have evolved may offer important lessons to inform our own challenges with our agricultural practices. Ants have established a form of agriculture that provides all the nourishment needed for their societies using a single crop that is resistant to disease, pests, and droughts at a scale and level of efficiency that rivals human agriculture."

Given our own disastrous experience with monocultures, we've much to learn.

A pair of Canterbury entrepreneurs are putting ants on the menu at restaurants around the country.

We spend much of summer trying to keep ants out of our food; yet they might be what's missing from it, say a pair of young Kiwi entrepreneurs.

With their start-up company Anteater, Canterbury University students Peter Randrup and Bex De Prospo are trying to drive in New Zealand what's become an emerging industry in Western countries, called "entomophagy", or insect consumption.

Anteater, a University of Canterbury Centre for Entrepreneurship (UCE) student company that just scooped the university's 85K Challenge, is now working with high-end food producers to make dishes from insects to be served in restaurants throughout the country.

"We view this as a first step toward mainstreaming these products as a viable, sustainable alternative to factory-farmed meat," said Randrup, an insect biology student searching for more efficient, sustainable ways to produce high-quality protein sources.

"My favourite statistic is that if you swapped out just one serving of conventional protein for insect protein once a week, over the course of a year you would free up 100 to 150 square metres of land somewhere on the planet."

Randrup, a vegetarian, got the idea after reading an article about entomophagy and then pitched the idea at an entrepreneurial event at the university in April.

But, seeing the potential, jumped on board and helped grow the business, also losing her taste for meat in the process.

She's now focused on finding out how to best use the business model to help feed people around the world, and hopes to adapt existing insect-farming models to produce kitset farms which can be sent to residents of impoverished regions.

"The statistics on how much grain is produced to feed livestock, while the human population in many of these places are left starving, are absolutely staggering."

People with a taste for bugs can find their offerings at Roots Restaurant in Lyttelton, Vault 21 in Dunedin, Antoine's Restaurant in Auckland and Mexico restaurants in Britomart, Takapuna, Ponsonby, Ellerslie, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch.

Meanwhile, the Government has announced $3 million will be poured into two programmes sitting within the "High-Value Nutrition" National Science Challenge.

"The research into high-value nutrition is hugely important in moving our food production from volume to value," Science and Innovation Minister Steven Joyce said.

"These projects will help product development that brings maximum returns for New Zealand food exporters."

The "Consumer Insights" research programme has received up to $1.5 million has been allocated to research the science of consumers, with a focus on health and wellness needs of Asian consumers.

Joyce said it would explore what was needed to establish a habitual consumption of high-value nutritional foods, something vital in ensuring investment was directed in areas that will resonate most with consumers.

The completed first phase of this work studied the information currently available to New Zealand businesses, and their knowledge gaps in understanding consumers' needs and behaviours.

The programme, led by Plant and Food Research's Dr Roger Harker, would ultimately provide direction to clinical research supporting the development of high-value foods and beverages for the Asian market.

The other programme, dubbed the "Science of Food", would receive $1.5 million to address the technological challenges in protecting the health promoting compounds in food during the journey from raw ingredients to finished food products, through to digestion.

A team, led by Distinguished Professor Harjinder Singh of Massey University's Riddet Institute, would design ingredients and processes that kept the compounds in top condition within food products, so that when eaten, they were released to the body at the right stage of digestion needed to deliver their identified health benefits.

Bacterial defences of fungus-farming ants could help in medical battle against superbugs

Scientists have pinpointed a promising new source of antibiotics: ants. They have found that some species – including leaf-cutter ants from the Amazon – use bacteria to defend their nests against invading fungi and microbes.

Chemicals excreted by the bacteria as part of this fight have been shown to have particularly powerful antibiotic effects and researchers are now preparing to test them in animals to determine their potential as medicines for humans.

Doctors say new antibiotics are urgently needed as superbug resistance to standard antimicrobial agents spreads. More than 700,000 people globally now die of drug-resistant infections each year, it is estimated – and some health officials say this figure could be even higher.

Last week, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, speaking at the first general assembly meeting on drug-resistant bacteria, said antimicrobial resistance was now a fundamental threat to global health.

This was reiterated by Professor Cameron Currie of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, one of the scientists involved in the ant research.

“Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem,” he said last week. “However, pinpointing new antibiotics using the standard technique of sampling soil for bacteria is tricky. On average, only one in a million strains proves promising. By contrast, we have uncovered a promising strain of bacteria for every 15 strains we have sampled from an ant’s nest.”

Only a very specific group of ants are proving useful in this work, however. These are species that farm fungi in tropical regions in North and South America.

“These ants forage for plant material, which they bring back to their nests and feed to a fungus,” said Professor Jon Clardy of Harvard Medical School. “The fungus breaks down the plant material and the ants feed on the fungus.”

The strategy evolved around 15 million years ago, and has proved highly successful. There are now more than 200 ant species that farm fungi. Most fungus-farming ants simply forage for bits of old leaf or grass on the ground, however. A few, like leaf-cutter ants, cut leaves from trees and bring them back in pieces to their nest. “Plants are hard to digest, but fungi are good decomposers and break down plant material so ants can feed easily,” said Ethan Van Arnam, also of Harvard Medical School.

However, scientists have recently discovered that these nests are sometimes attacked by hostile fungi. “They kill off both the nest and its farmed fungus,” said Clardy. “In turn, ants have developed defences revealed as white patches on their bodies. They look as if they had been dipped in powdered sugar. These patches are made of bacteria which the ant stores on its body. Crucially, these bacteria produce powerful antibiotic and antifungal agents.”

In this way, ants nurture bacteria which in turn make antifungal and antibacterial agents that defend nests. More to the point, these bacteria are similar to the ones used by pharmaceutical companies to make antibiotics. A typical example is Apterostigma ants, whose bacterial strains have been isolated in Panama and brought back to Harvard by Van Arnam. Many show promising antibiotic activity, he told the Observer.

“The ants don’t always win,” added Clardy. “You occasionally come across nests that have been overcome by invading fungi. But it is clear ants and their bacteria put up a very good fight, one that has been going on for millions of years. The result has been the production of some very interesting antibiotics.”

Clardy said foreign bacteria also attacked the ant’s microbe defences. “The bacteria in the nests get a really good deal. They are protected and fed by ants. Other strains of bacteria want to take over that comfortable niche. It is the bacterial equivalent of Game of Thrones. Everyone is trying to kill off everyone else and get to the top. The result has been the development of some very powerful antibiotic weapons. These are the end products of an arms race that has been going on for 15 million years. Our trick is to isolate the best of these weapons and use them to make new antibiotics for humans.”

Scientists describe workers trapped for years in "a hostile environment in total darkness."

For the past several years, a group of researchers has been observing a seemingly impossible wood ant colony living in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker in Templewo, Poland, near the German border. Completely isolated from the outside world, these members of the species Formica polyctena have created an ant society unlike anything we've seen before.

The Soviets built the bunker during the Cold War to store nuclear weapons, sinking it below ground and planting trees on top as camouflage. Eventually a massive colony of wood ants took up residence in the soil over the bunker. There was just one problem: the ants built their nest directly over a vertical ventilation pipe. When the metal covering on the pipe finally rusted away, it left a dangerous, open hole. Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out. The survivors have nevertheless carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Except, of course, that this situation is far from normal.

Polish Academy of Sciences zoologist Wojciech Czechowski and his colleagues discovered the nest after a group of other zoologists found that bats were living in the bunker. Though it was technically not legal to go inside, the bat researchers figured out a way to squeeze into the small, confined space and observe the animals inside. Czechowski's team followed suit when they heard that the place was swarming with ants. What they found, over two seasons of observation, was a group of almost a million worker ants whose lives are so strange that they hesitate to call them a "colony" in the observations they just published in The Journal of Hymenoptera. Because conditions in the bunker are so harsh, constantly cold, and mostly barren, the ants seem to live in a state of near-starvation. They produce no queens, no males, and no offspring. The massive group tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants falling down the ventilation shaft.
Like most ant species, wood ants are tidy animals who remove waste from their colony. In the case of the bunker ants, most of this waste is composed of dead bodies. The researchers speculate that mortality in the "colony" is likely much higher than under normal circumstances. "Flat parts of the earthen mound [of the nest] and the floor of the adjacent spaces ... were carpeted with bodies of dead ants," write Czechowski and colleagues. This "ant cemetery" was a few centimeters thick in places, and "one cubic decimeter sample contained [roughly] 8,000 corpses," which led the researchers to suggest that there were likely 2 million dead ants piled around the nest mound. The sheer numbers of dead bodies suggest that this orphaned wood ant nest has been active for many years.

The ant graveyard is also host to a tiny ecosystem, where mites and a few other invertebrates feed on the bodies of the dead wood ants. The question is, what are the wood ants eating? It's possible they have figured out how to eat the creatures who feast in their cemeteries, essentially making them cannibals at one remove. But Czechowski and his team dismiss this as unlikely. It's also possible that there are nutrients growing in the bat guano from the ants' only living neighbors in the bunker. But in their years of observation, the scientists still haven't figured out for certain what the ants' source of food is.

Wood ants are known for surviving in harsh conditions, and they have been found on remote islands as well as living in small, closed boxes. And it's not impossible that this underworld colony could bloom into something more. In a previous experiment, Czechowski showed that orphaned wood ant colonies will adopt queens from related species. So if a queen ant fell down the pipe, she might join this colony and start reproducing. Unfortunately, however, without a steady food supply the ants probably wouldn't have enough energy to raise a new generation and keep the nest warm for them. So the only way this nest carries on is by waiting for a new rain of ants from the free colony above ground.

The paper's conclusion reads like a dystopian science fiction scene from the 1970s:

The wood-ant ‘colony’ described here – although superficially looking like a functioning colony with workers teeming on the surface of the mound – is rather an example of survival of a large amount of workers trapped within a hostile environment in total darkness, with constantly low temperatures and no ample supply of food. The continued survival of the ‘colony’ through the years is dependent on new workers falling in through the ventilation pipe. The supplement of workers more than compensates for the mortality rate of workers such that through the years the bunker workforce has grown to the level of big, mature natural colonies.
Life in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker is nightmarish, even for the humble ant. It appears that the legacy of the Soviet occupation of Poland doesn't just haunt the country's human population. It has affected the social structures of insects too.

Finding new species may call to mind images of scientists tracking mysterious footprints in the mud or cutting paths through the dense jungle.

But sometimes, a discovery is as easy as getting a frog to open its mouth and say, “Ah.”

Such is the case for Lenomyrmex hoelldobleri, a new tropical ant species found in the belly of a diablito, or little devil frog (Oophaga sylvatica), in Ecuador.

The diablito, a kind of bright orange poison frog, is known for its love of ants, says Christian Rabeling, a myrmecologist at the University of Rochester, New York. The new ant species is named after Bert Hölldobler, a German evolutionary biologist and ant expert, for his 80th birthday.

Because ant-eating frogs go hunting for bugs in tiny and hard-to-access places, scientists use them as a tool to go where they can’t go. By capturing a wild frog and flushing their stomachs, the amphibians vomit whatever is in their bellies—revealing potential treasures, like the new ant.

“Sometimes people think that our world is very well explored. Nothing could be farther from the truth,” says Rabeling, who led a new study on the ant, published September 19 by the journal ZooKeys.

Mysterious Ant

Because the only known specimen of L. hoelldobleri is a dead one from a frog's stomach, scientists know almost nothing about it.

A glimpse through a high-powered stereomicroscope at that ill-fated ant, however, has offered a few clues. (See "Watch: Ants Use Giant Jaws to Catapult Out of Death Trap.")

“The shape of the mandibles reminds me of forceps,” says Rabeling. This may mean that the ant, which is less than a quarter of an inch long, uses its mouthparts to pry even smaller prey animals, such as termites, out of tight crevices. “But I am just speculating,” he admits.

If the scientists could find living L. hoelldobleri in the Ecuadoran rain forest, the team they could submit the little guys to a “cafeteria test," which means offering an animal multiple prey items to see what it prefers. (See "Surprising Ant 'Mixing Bowl' Found in Manhattan.")

“The difficulty is finding the ants!” says Rabeling.

The little devil frog, obviously, has figured out how to locate them—and for good reason.

Poison frogs get their namesake chemical defenses from alkaloids found in the ants and other critters they consume, says Jonathan Kolby, a National Geographic grantee and director of the Honduras Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Center.

"Physiologists regard ants as mini chemical factories," adds Rabeling. The insects likely use the chemicals as signals to communicate with other ants in their complex societies.

As for where the ants get their alkaloids, Kolby says some species may acquire it from the plants they eat. But what role, if any, L. hoelldobleri may play in the poison game is anyone’s guess.

Belly of the Beast

Because many amphibians are endangered—the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists O. sylvatica as near threatened—any research with wild frogs must be done carefully, and only by trained experts, Rabeling notes. (Read more about why amphibians are vanishing.)

To flush the stomach, scientists insert a soft tube into the amphibian’s mouth and gently fill it with water, prompting whatever the frog has eaten recently to flow out of its mouth and onto a tray. The frog can then be safely returned to its natural habitat.

This is not the first time a new species has been found inside another animal’s stomach, by the way. Kolby points to the example of Dunn’s earth snake (Geophis dunni), which was found in the stomach of a coral snake (Micrurus nigrocinctus) in Nicaragua in 1932.

Furthermore, it seems L. hoelldobleri had some company in the little devil frog’s stomach. The research project that first identified the new ant also found several other as-of-yet undescribed insects.

It seems the little devil’s frog's belly might be the gift that keeps on giving.